Cradle Book

About This Title

Timeless yet timely, hopeful with a dark underbelly, the fables and stories in Cradle Book revive a tradition running from Aesop to W.S. Merwin. With a poet’s mastery, Teicher creates strange worlds populated by animals fated for disaster and people who interact with them, or simply act like them, including a very sad boy who wishes he had been raised by wolves. There are also a handful of badly-behaving Gods, a talking tree, and a shape-shifting room.

“Wrapped lightly in philosophy and whimsy and wisdom, here's a book to be savored, and revisited, and read aloud. Teicher is brewing some elegant magic here.”

—Aimee Bender

“Populated with account-keeping birds, wolves whose ‘bite is like a breeze,’ an invisible man, a nameless man, and children who find dust balls and ‘care for particular clumps as pets,’ Teicher’s stories are full of mystery and doubt and despair. These are fables with the hearts of haiku. Their conclusions, if they may even be termed as such, are full of question marks and quicksand and rabbit holes. A writer imagines writing a line that goes through the paper and into the horizon and writes, ‘I will follow that line until there is no next thing’; a story can’t settle on its subject; men die and become crows. With the lightest touch, Teicher prods at our human mysteries, cloaking a very real and complex view of the world we live in through the language and staging of fairytale, diorama, and dream.”

—Matthea Harvey

The Wolves

Wolves rule these woods. They have overthrown the old rulers, conquered all the creatures, and now these woods belong to them. But do not be afraid if you pass this way. There is nothing here that can harm you, because, of course, the wolves are made of something less than air. Their bite is like a breeze. When they run a few leaves shake. Perhaps a flower bends when they howl. Pass through the woods whenever you like. What you have to fear is not in the woods.